To have or not to have? Attachments...

[sbj]

Hello,

I am not sure if I should enable this option and wanted to know how other admins manage their sites.

If you allow it, it would be nice to tell us your settings and fill this out.
You can find your settings here: ACP->Home->Options->Attachments
----------------------------
If yes:

Maximum Attachment File Size (KB):
Maximum Attachments per Message:
Allowed Attachment File Extensions:
Maximum Attachment Image Dimensions:
Attachment Thumbnail Dimensions:
Board size:

Spoiler: Mine look like this

Maximum Attachment File Size (KB): 7936
Maximum Attachments per Message: 10
Allowed Attachment File Extensions: zip, txt, pdf, png, jpg, jpeg, jpe, gif
Maximum Attachment Image Dimensions: 1200 x 1000
Attachment Thumbnail Dimensions: 100
Board size: very small

If no:

Board size:
----------------------------

But I am not sure about my settings. And I consider disabling it at all. Saves disk space. People could use other services for image uploading or for other attachments. Just, I'm not sure how members would think about that. They wouldn't like this I assume and this would lower posting. But you are asked, what do you do? What can you say?

PS:

Spoiler: Board size:

10+ Million messages: very big
1+ Million messages: big
100 000+ messages: normal
10 000+ messages: small
0+ messages: very small

 

[Walter]

Completely depends on the topic of your forum. Users are not only uploading pictures but also documents.

 

[51463]

I turned off the attachments for the whole board for years.

I've always told my users to use a 3rd party website but ever since the Media Gallery came out now thats the only place i let them upload images. And it works fine. I find it better than attachments.

But i only allow images to be uploaded never documents.

 

[Gazhyde]

Don't know why you wouldn't allow attachments, my pet hate is being on a forum you have to upload images to an external (slow/buggy /bandwidth limited) service. Disk space is really cheap these days.

Our members post a lot of photos in the threads. We just love looking at each others cars

Number of Attachments: 9,447
Attachment Disk Usage (MB): 1,961.26

Maximum Attachment File Size (KB): 10240
Maximum Attachments per Message: 20
Allowed Attachment File Extensions: zip, txt, pdf, png, jpg, jpeg, jpe, gif, mp3
Maximum Attachment Image Dimensions: 1024 x 768
Attachment Thumbnail Dimensions: 600
Board size: 79,300 posts

We've also run XFMG since it was originally released by Chris, and have 1200 media items in that all hosted on my server.

 

[DaveM]

This has always been an issue for me as I came from VB and had a gallery with that. My biggest problem now also having Media gallery and attachments is the members images are split so to speak. So if the Media gallery brings it in so attachments would also be placed into a gallery for each member that would be the best of both worlds

 

[sbj]

Well, of course it depends on what kind of a website you run or what features you need (Media Galery or not), but I was talking about a general forum. A photography forum would need this obviously.

So it looks like that I should enable it.

Isn't 10mb not too much @Gazhyde ?

 

[imthebest]

It's not all about disk space but also about bandwidth consumption... if you have a big board attachments would eat up your assigned bw quickly...

 

[Gazhyde]

Isn't 10mb not too much @Gazhyde ?

I doubt I have more than a handful of files anywhere near that size.

Going on the figures in my first post attachment sizes average about 210k. Obviously the image resizing on upload does its job in keeping sizes reasonable.

I don't have bandwidth restrictions so that doesn't affect me

 

[keith.arvixe]

I think that it depends on what you need it for. Most of the forums that I have managed or owned I don't do that because I have had issues in the past with users abusing this and posting inappropriate photos. I have seen forums where they make this work beautifully and if you can that's all that matters!